Thought for the day...

Coaching for excellence – an introduction
to coaching skills

Overview

If you are passionate about unlocking a person’s potential in a way that leaves them more competent and more fulfilled so they are able to maximise their own performance, then this is the right workshop for you.

The programme has been designed to help you:

Recognise the variety of personal styles available to you

Identify when to action each of those styles

Apply essential key tools and techniques to enable you to activate your style of manager as coach

Training objectives

The aim of this programme is to help you:

Understand the importance of a clear agreement on the nature of the coaching relationship, the respective responsibilities and the desired outcome

Become familiar with how to structure a coaching session and the benefits a structured process brings

Build your confidence in initiating and owning a coaching session

Gain a greater understanding of why people do the things they do and how their values and beliefs help or hinder

Experience a coaching session as a coach and as a coachee

Take a first step towards achieving a personal goal

Recognise that good listening supplies the building blocks to good understanding

Becoming familiar with the variety of sessions the coach may need to generate at any given moment

Appreciate how coaching can increase motivation and performance

Audience

This programme is ideal for all those who either line or project manage staff or who need to maximise effective working relationships.

Format

This one-day workshop is based upon a series of short theory and good practice facilitator-led sessions followed up by personal practice. Group discussions are used to identify personal experiences of good and bad coaching experiences. Expert trainer feedback enables participants to develop workable personal action plans for improved confidence and performance.

The expert trainer

Cyrus Cooper (Managing Director of Maximum Performance) is an exceptional trainer, facilitator and coach. He specialises in helping managers to focus on their role and responsibilities with the aim of getting great results with the people they manage. He has helped organisations in both the public and private sectors to increase their performance through a range of interventions covering leadership challenges, motivational management and corporate and executive 1:1 coaching. Formerly an internal learning and development consultant to the Ministry of Justice, his achievements there ranged from a major business process re-engineering (BPR) project to designing performance management systems and competency frameworks for over 12,000 staff and creating a range of management programmes for middle / senior civil servants that are still being run to this day.

Cyrus is passionate about coaching as well as training, and has recently developed an organisational-wide coaching programme for the Big Lottery Fund. He currently works with Thomson Reuters graduates on a global graduate scheme, delivering a week of self-discovery, supported by the FACET5 profiling tool. His other current / recent clients include the BBC, 3M, Accenture, Inter Hannover, Legoland, Merlin Entertainments, Mouchel, Phytopharm, Office of the Public Guardian, The Gap Partnership, Central Bedfordshire Council, Finsbury Foods, Lancashire Group, RED Consulting, Gala Coral, De Lage Landen, the Methodist Church, Shaw Trust and the Housing Solutions Group, to name but a few. Whether delivering a one-off workshop or designing an innovative management development programme, Cyrus delivers with understanding, enthusiasm and passion, and truly believes that learning is about creation, not consumption.

Cyrus’s academic and professional qualifications include a Masters Degree in Management Practice, MBTI accredited, SDI accredited, Facet5 accredited, DiSC accredited, Diploma in Executive and Corporate Coaching, Diploma in Business Coaching, Diploma in Business Excellence (EFQM), NVQ Assessor, etc. Cyrus is enthusiastic and practical in his approach, with tools and methodologies explained clearly. His strong facilitation skills and focus on his audience create a powerful learning experience and the response from individual participants is invariably appreciative, as the following comments show:

‘I have had the pleasure of working with Maximum Performance (and Cyrus Cooper in particular) to deliver a coaching programme across the Big Lottery Fund. We co-constructed and piloted the programme to skill managers in the basics of coaching and create a programme of development for Senior Leaders to also build their coaching skills. What Cyrus delivered was a programme that impacted on us with a huge amount of insight, interest and invigoration around coaching as a key skill in our leaders, managers and talent programme participants. We are about to launch our own internal coaching network that will continue and spread the great work Cyrus did for us.’ Perry Timms,Head of Talent & Organisational Development, BIG Lottery Fund

‘Maximum Performance were engaged by Thomson Reuters to redesign our technology graduate development centre (the integral piece of the graduates’ two year training programme). Throughout the programme redesign, I found Maximum Performance to be extremely responsive, creative in their approach and also dedicated to building a bespoke solution for Thomson Reuters. The feedback from stakeholders and delegates has been very positive on the content delivered , the facilitator’s training style and Maximum Performance’s ability to hit the ground running, intimately understanding our needs.’ Khalil Ayub, Technology Graduate Scheme Manager, Thomson Reuters

‘We used Maximum Performance to design and deliver leadership skills for our people managers at LEGOLAND Windsor. We were pleased with the structured approach which provided a parallel process to our Team Leader training activities. Maximum Performance also helped incorporate some new training techniques we wanted to try such as Forum Theatre. Overall this part of the session was fun and energetic. It provided a powerful and memorable alternative to role play with excellent feedback from our managers.’ Head of Learning & Development, Legoland

Course outline

Welcome and introduction

Participants are welcomed to the programme and invited to share their personal objectives and people challenges

Self-assessment of current coaching skills

Spectrum of skills – identifying the skills required to be an effective coach

How the mind can be a barrier to achieving performance

Why this is crucial to success

The power of beliefs – what are they and how they can affect us

Positive and negative self-talk

The concept of ‘positive intention’

The coaching structure and conversation

A coaching case study

‘The answer is in the question’

The coaching game – a board game with a difference! Coach your way to success…

The GROW model of coaching

Practice sessions

Participants will be given the opportunity to practice their coaching skills by being both a coach and a coachee, using their real-life scenarios. Feedback is given along with action points to develop skills further.